Understanding different cultures through dance

When Cynthia Lee came to UCLA for graduate school, she was surprised to see familiar faces.

“I thought, “˜This is weird. There are so many people who look like me,'” Lee said.

A Taiwanese-American whose parents immigrated to the United States in the 1970s, Lee is used to being surrounded by people from different cultural backgrounds. She was one of the only Asian students in her elementary school classrooms in Texas, and she spent a year studying abroad.

As a result, Lee has found an interest in the study of different cultures and learning about them through dance.

On Friday and Saturday night, Lee will present her thesis showcase for the World Arts and Cultures Department’s master of fine arts program, “playing between,” at Glorya Kaufman Hall. The performance features five pieces starring and choreographed by Lee.

Lee’s interest in dance as a medium for understanding other cultures stemmed from an African dance class she took as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College.

“The experience of trying to embody kinds of movement that felt foreign to me, like being really grounded, the sense of a community circle rather than everyone facing the mirror … all of this felt like sort of encoded information about a cultural world view,” she said.

Lee remembers feeling awkward at times in the class, trying to understand forms of dance from a completely different culture.

“But then something clicks,” she said. “(The dance) gives you an insight into a totally different way of approaching the world.”

Lee discovered that, through the medium, she could learn much more about a culture than through conventional textbook-based learning.

“It struck me that in academia, you read books and you kind of find out about (a culture), but it’s not something that implicates you,” she said. “When you learn the dance form in different cultures, you put yourself on the line physically. You have to be awkward and uncomfortable and have the change happen internally. It’s a more humble and intimate way of learning.”

After taking another dance class, Lee found that the dance form of kathak, a type of Indian classical dance, completely engaged her. Kathak is now her main focus and the basis of “playing between.”

As a senior in college, Lee received the Thomas J. Watson fellowship to study abroad for a year, during which she studied religious dance.

“I grew up in a family where we practiced rituals indigenous to Taiwan, and something about dance and movement always felt like it had this potential of being deeply spiritual,” she said.

As one of approximately 60 graduating college seniors in the U.S. to receive the fellowship, Lee was given a one-year grant to pursue independent studies outside of the country.

Lee chose to study in Thailand, Brazil, and India. During her year abroad, she became more connected to kathak and also began to see how dance could be used as a way to negotiate intercultural exchanges, an idea that is deeply embedded into her showcase.

“I was interested as a dancer in how, by learning the dance form of a culture that is not my own, I can learn about cultural values imbedded in those cultures’ dance forms,” Lee said. “Then as a choreographer, I thought (about) how I could bring that experience of having to learn and make connections with people I didn’t know into my dance-making.”

Lee says that the models of western choreography that she was familiar with did not have a straightforward answer for how to exchange cultural ideas through dance.

Lee attempts to provide her own answer through pieces in her showcase, such as “ruddha (rude, huh?),” where she takes a traditional kathak rhythmic composition of short, soft syllables and mixes them with English words that resemble the sounds of the syllables. The dance in this piece mimics the mix of cultures by moving between kathak dance and western modern dance.

In another piece from the showcase, Lee performs an improvisational duet with a friend of Mexican descent, again displaying an exchange of cultures through dance.

“When you’re improvising together, you have to listen to each other in the moment; you have to compromise and negotiate and figure out how to connect to each other in front of an audience,” she said. “You can’t fake that. It’s a real connection.”

Lee hopes that audiences will also find a connection to her experiences with and expressions of cultural exchanges.

“My hope is that the performance will inspire people to think about the ways in which different cultures intersect in their own lives … and to see that, even though there’s conflict and power struggles, that there are also genuine cross-cultural connections being made.”

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